If there’s a single adjective that unites Brian Chippendale’s work as drummer and vocalist for seminal noise-rock band Lightning Bolt and his work as the creator of avant-garde comics, it’s this one: raw. Everything he does has an immediacy and a grittiness that cuts past your defenses and makes you feel anger, sympathy, fear, or joy.
Vulture
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“Chippendale’s... obsessively detailed [comics] feel like [they’ve] been shot straight from his brain onto the page.” —Village Voice
Puke Force is social satire written dark and dense across Brian Chippendale’s deconstructed multiverse of walking, talking M&Ms, hamsters, and cycloptic-yet-glamorous trivia hosts. In scathingly funny single-page strips that build and build, he takes on social media narcissism, governmental propaganda, racism, and a culture of violence, skewering the malice of the right and the hypocrisy of the left.
A bomb explodes in a coffee shop: the incident is played out over and over again from the perspective of each table in the shop, revisiting moments from ten and twenty years before. We see the inevitable as the characters bicker or celebrate, unaware of what’s coming. Throughout this dystopic graphic novel, Chippendale uses humor and a frantic drawing style to show how the insidious nature of corporate greed and the commodification of everything have warped society into a killing machine.
Sardonic and self-aware, Puke Force asks all the right questions, providing a startling and on-point take on contemporary social issues. Chippendale’s artwork makes each panel a masterpiece of thrumming linework and lo-fi magic, as his storytelling wends and winds its way to a fascinating conclusion.
Praise for Puke Force
Even though Chippendale began working on the text seven years ago, the themes explored in Puke Force feel on-the-pulse, suggesting a naysayer-like quality to the artist.
VICE
Brian Chippendale’s laugh-out-loud, labyrinthine Puke Force is less a story than it is a city – a thriving, pulsing, postapocalyptic shopping plaza in which the artist’s odd little people live their lives.
The Globe and Mail
There’s no way to do justice to the panoply of ideas, sensations, and emotions on display here, from snarky bathroom humor to deep and abiding anger at the dissolution of civil society. It contains multitudes. It is also, without question, the first masterpiece of 2016.
The A.V Club
Chippendale’s love of language and puns is infectious and he’s one of the few contemporary cartoonists whose artistic originality is matched by the originality of his writing.
The Comics Journal
Puke Force is a collection of one of the most surreal, twisted, and detailed comic books ever put to paper.
Newsrama
Puke Force furthers Chippendale's life-long mission to make art that's at once accessible and experimental, and he's succeeded yet again.
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